Rentalic, a person-to-person rental marketplace, and appbackr, a wholesale digital marketplace where iPhone app developers can get immediate funding by selling wholesale units to buyers, were named the two top winners of the first PayPal X Developer Challenge.
Rentalic and appbackr were chosen from eleven finalists by a panel of expert industry judges, including Pierre Omidyar, chairman of eBay; Scott Thompson, president of PayPal; Marc Andreessen, general partner of Andreessen/Horowitz; Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital; and Scott Cook of Intuit.
The eleven finalists also were selected by popular vote on x.com, PayPal's developer site, having been chosen from a starting field of more than 650 entrants. The two winners share $150,000 in prizes.
Rentalic's patent-pending business transaction model uses PayPal's "Pre-Authorize" API to validate that the borrower has sufficient funds for rental fee and deposit before making a reservation. It then uses PayPal's Chained Payment API to transfer the rental fee and deposit from a borrower's account to the owner's account, and rentalic charges a 5% service fee from the rental fee portion received in the owner's account. After the borrower returns the item back to owner, the owner can go on the site, provide feedback and do a full or partial refund of the deposit by just clicking a button. In the future, Rentalic will be implementing mobile apps and IVR solutions to make this transaction model even more convenient for everyone to use.
appbackr represents a new approach for wholesale buyers to purchase wholesale copies of iPhone applications before they are available on iTunes. appbackr gives developers immediate funds by letting wholesale buyers and VAMs buy wholesale copies of the apps in either finished or conceptual form. The process is simple: Developers register their iPhone apps for pre-sale with appbackr, controlling who can purchase queue numbers of applications that will be sold in the iTunes Store. The buyers have the option of paying $0.30 per queue number for an application that is still a raw concept, or $0.45 per queue number for finished applications. When the application is made available on the iTunes Store, wholesale buyers are paid automatically for each download, and monies are flowed directly to their appbackr bank account using PayPal. It's an innovative solution that leverages the innovation of Apple's iTunes, PayPal's adaptive API, and the patent-pending appbackr technology to help developers fund and sell their applications.
